Tens of thousands more Americans have died from various causes than otherwise would have from 2010-2017 had the mortality rated stayed constant through the time period.
The Journal of the American Medical Association published a study on Tuesday highlighting the increase in American mortality. Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine professor Steven Woolf and Eastern Virginia Medical School researcher Heidi Schoomaker co-authored the work.
Woolf and Schoomaker compiled U.S. mortality data from federal databases, calculating overall mortality as well as tracking individual causes of death, such as drug overdoses and car accidents. The pair covered over a half century of data from 1959 through 2017.
The pair found that the mortality rate of U.S. adults age 25-64 years old had risen alarmingly in recent years. They estimate that 33,000 more working-age adults have died from 2010 to 2017 than otherwise would have had mortality stayed constant.
“The fact that that number is climbing, there’s something terribly wrong,” Woolf told the Washington Post.
Ellen Meara, a professor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, said that while the data shows a troubling trend, it does not point to any single issue. Rather, the overall trend in deaths, from the opioid epidemic to increasing obesity to more car crashes, evidences a more root cause.
“There’s something more fundamental about how people are feeling at some level — whether it’s economic, whether it’s stress, whether it’s deterioration of family,” Meara said. “People are feeling worse about themselves and their futures, and that’s leading them to do things that are self-destructive and not promoting health.”
